To .Mac or Not To .Mac?

To .Mac or Not To .Mac? If the results of our poll asking for your opinions of Apple's charges for .Mac are any indication, Apple will soon be serving somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 .Mac customers, down from 2,200,000 iTools users. Some 85 percent of respondents to our poll said they wouldn't be using .Mac, though the vast majority had used iTools. Of the 15 percent who do plan to use .Mac, 13 percent had previously used iTools, and 2 percent were new users attracted by .Mac's features. Although I still encourage everyone to register their feedback with Apple directly, after results like this and the discussions on TidBITS Talk, it seems to me that the people at Apple making this decision understand the consequences and have decided the harsh medicine is still necessary. Chuck Goolsbee, VP of Technical Operations at digital.forest, our Web and mailing list host, estimated in a TidBITS Talk posting that iTools was likely costing Apple at least $10 to $20 million per year, if not more. Though Apple has kept its corporate head above water with modest profits of late, it's easy to understand Apple's need to reign in costs related to iTools, even at the cost of significant goodwill among existing customers. [ACE]